On Monument Avenue | Controversial From the Start

John Mitchell, Jr. abstained from voting on the appropriation of city money to fund the unveiling parade for the Robert E. Lee monument in 1890. Mitchell, a city alderman for Jackson Ward, a banker, and editor of the African American newspaper the RichmondPlanet noted, tactfully, that he “was a great admirer of General Lee,” but demurred “by asking that those who wore the ‘clanging chains’ should be allowed to keep silent and not vote.” Other Council members thought that the city had no right “to get up a big parade to benefit only a certain class of people.”

In the 1890s, at the height of Confederate memorialization in Richmond, not everyone felt the urge to celebrate, and different people expressed their dissent in different ways. The Lee Monument commemorations had meaning to many people in 1890 beyond the simple admiration for a dead hero. Statues of Confederates, then, were controversial from the start.

“The people of the South had to grunt and groan to raise a few thousand dollars for the Lee monument…the men who talk most about the valor of Lee, and the blood of the brave Confederate dead are those who never smelt powder or engaged in a battle. MORAL:--Go to the Northern man for money; the Southern man for sentiment.”

At other times, he used genial observation to make critical points. At the Lee memorial unveiling in 1890, Mitchell witnessed a particularly unperturbed gentlemen, “an old colored man,” as Mitchell said, who “after seeing the mammoth parade of ex-Confederates … and gazing at the rebel flags, exclaimed, ‘The Southern white folks is on top—the Southern white folks is on top!’” Mitchell continued, “After thinking for a moment a smile lit up his countenance as he chuckled with evident satisfaction, ‘But we’ve got the government! We’ve got the government!’” Historian Kirk Savage suggests that the man, while wary of the ascendency of the local Democratic Party with a segregationist agenda, still saw hope for African Americans that the federal government remained in the hands of the party of Lincoln.

Mitchell, whose strategic politeness was more circumspect than confrontational, sighed. “The Negro was in the Northern processions on Decoration Day and in Southern ones, if only to carry buckets of ice-water. He put up the Lee Monument, and should the time come, will be there to take it down. He’s black and sometimes greasy, but who could do without the Negro?” While Mitchell used studied wit and an air of resignation in order to navigate an increasingly ominous political and racial environment in Richmond, he let others, who did not have to bow to racial conventions in Richmond, speak harsher words.

For instance, Mitchell excerpted in the Planet a speech by Iowa Congressman J.P. Dolliver, who lamented that “in the throng [the audience at the Lee Monument unveiling] were doubtless aged men and women who had heard the jargon of the auctioneer repeated over their defenceless [sic] heads.” Dolliver concluded, “the statue at Richmond seems like a weak and clumsy protest against the flood of years.”

Monument building even revived tension between reconciled enemies.

Since 1884, the Robert E. Lee Camp of Confederate veterans had happily communed with Grand Army of the Republic [G.A.R.], a United States veterans organization. They even shared office space with the G.A.R.’s Richmond branch, the Phil Kearney Post, and frequently visited reunions from New Jersey to Chicago.

The Lee Camp welcomed donations worth thousands of dollars from numerous G.A.R. posts to build their Confederate Soldiers Home on Richmond’s western outskirts.

The friendship between the Lee Camp and the G.A.R. soured in 1894 when the Reverend Robert Cave delivered a particularly strident political defense of the Confederacy alongside an attack on the Union at the unveiling of the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Libby Hill. The Columbia Post of the G.A.R. in Chicago dispatched a public letter to the Lee Camp inquiring whether the ex-Confederates endorsed Cave’s unreconciled language. After some deliberation the Lee Camp wrote back that, indeed, they did. Several years passed before Lee Camp and G.A.R. veterans were reconciled, yet again, and began showing up at each other’s reunions.

While Mitchell’s wit and circumspection and the G.A.R.’s ruffled feathers indicated that the claims that Confederate memorialists made about their virtuous histories did not go undisputed in their day, a young historian then graduating from Harvard University delivered a more forceful rejoinder.

DuBois had no particular quarrel with Davis, whom he called “a naturally brave and generous man,” but instead criticized Davis as a representative type—a “Strong Man,” acting out a selfish “Individualism coupled with the rule of might,”—that societies DuBois called “Teutonic” tended to admire. Societies like the United States that lifted up “Strong Men,” DuBois said, pursued merciless nationalistic agendas that “advance[d] a part of the world at the expense of the whole,” and harbored “the overweening sense of the I and the consequent forgetting of the Thou.”

According to DuBois, Davis had championed a “Strong Nation,” as an American who advocated for the acquisition of Native American lands “by murdering Indians,” and by taking a heroic role in “a national disgrace called by courtesy, the Mexican War.” As Confederate president, DuBois said, Davis capped his career as “the peculiar champion of a people fighting to be free in order that another people should not be free.”

DuBois, thus, turned upside down the claims of the people who erected statues on Monument Avenue. Where they frequently characterized their heroes as “knightly,” and representative of the self-sacrifice required in a virtuous society, DuBois warned against conquest, brutality, and the perils of confusing military prowess with moral righteousness.

Mitchell’s barbs reflected a vigilance about racial conventions in the ascendant Jim Crow state, the G.A.R. worried that Confederate memory stoked hostility, and DuBois identified a poisonous strain in American civilization. They, along with many others, understood that the monuments had more to say about race, citizenship, and nationhood than at first appeared.

Comments

Please let me know if and when they take down a Statue of R.E.Lee, my lifelong hero from Monument ave or any others, so i can visit one last time, i am 70yrs. old, and fine it disturbing that this going on.

I did cry the destruction of any Art piece simply because it offends some of those who experience it. That said it is always polite to know your audience. I do support the idea of moving these monuments to places where people can choose to celebrate, admire, and critically discuss them more deeply at a time of their own choosing.

I agree with Brad Elsberry, We should relocate all Confederate Statues to Private Parks where one can go in peace to remember the past and look at the future, My Paternal Great Grand Father John P. Dees was wounded in the war, and My Maternal Great Grandfather, John Wesley Patton had three sons fight at Shiloh , All were simply Sharecroppers caught up in the war, None were slave owners ,yet I see the point of view of Slave descendants , I have never Flown a Confederate Flag, Yet I think it has Historical Value to be preserved , As a Nation we cannot Ignore The Past ,and Must Remember it for the Future Generations to understand how we evolved into a Nation and Now a Nation More Divided that during the Civil War , Hiding the past has never benefitted the Future... We Southerners should be very aware of making things worse by living in the past ..The War is Over but the Battles Still Rages on.

The Lee Statue is a wonderful example of art and history, but also of hope and remembrance for a beaten and destroyed South. If you have not had your home burned by Yankees you would not share that sentiment, just as all of us who have not endured the National tragedy of slavery find it difficult to even imagine its existence. Today we struggle with the self inflicted pain of our founding fathers failure to resolve the slavery issue, the resulting Civil War with the largest loss of American Life of any of the Wars fought, and the only war against ourselves. Reasonable dialog, discussion failed our founders, the Civil War failed to resolve our prejudices, can we, as Americans all, now step up to heal the divide or are we to pass this curse on to our heirs ?

Removal not destruction is appropriate. Some people may never understand what it is like to see an oppressor of human dignity celebrated on public land, land taxpayers support. A museum or private land makes sense.